Fox News anchor John Gibson is on a roll. On Wednesday, before the terrorist attacks in London, he said the following about the 2012 Olympics:

All day long people have been saying to me, “Wasn’t it great they didn’t pick Paris?” And I’ve been saying, “No, no, no.”

Paris was exactly the right place to pick and the Olympic committee screwed up.

Why? Simple. It would have been a three-week period where we wouldn’t have had to worry about terrorism.

First, the French think they are so good at dealing with the Arab world that they would have gone out and paid every terrorist off. And things would have been calm.

Or another way to look at it is the French are already up to their eyeballs in terrorists. The French hide them in miserable slums, out of sight of the rich people in Paris.

So it would have been a treat, actually, to watch the French dealing with the problem of their own homegrown Islamist terrorists living in France already.

You’d think that yesterday’s would’ve made Gibson reconsider, and perhaps apologize. Nope:

The bombings in London: This is why I thought the Brits should let the French have the Olympics — let somebody else be worried about guys with backpack bombs for a while.

What a cad. Gibson then uses the London bombings to shill for the PATRIOT Act:

And for this exact reason, I think the Patriot Act and other powers the feds have asked for to keep an eye on potential terrorists are important and should be put in place and kept in place and the police should use those powers.

Really? Here’s a UPI story from three years ago:

Big brother is big business in the battle against crime in Britain, but photo-shy villains have developed a bag of new tricks to elude the gaze of thousands of surveillance cameras that now dot its cities, towns and villages.

With 1.5 million closed-circuit television systems watching its streets, office buildings, schools, shopping centers and roads, Britain is one of the most closely monitored nations on the planet, and the government is spending another $115 million for more TV eyes.

But crime is soaring across the country. In London, a city of 8 million people, murder is going on at a record pace. Street robbery, the very crime that CCTV is supposed to be best at deterring, will reach 50,000 this year.

And it sure as hell didn’t help yesterday. London law enforcement had no warning about what was coming.

There’s a bit of disagreement over wether Ben Franklin actually said it or merely published it. And perhaps it has been so oversued of late, it’s become a bit trite. Nonetheless:

“Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

I’d change “deserve” to “get” or “reap.” No one deserves what happened yesterday. Otherwise, the quote is as apt today as it was then.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 8th, 2005 at 7:29 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.